Publications

During my bachelor and master, I published some paper while “working” at NECSTLab, a laboratory inside Politecnico di Milano which focuses on systems (OS and hardware design) and security.

I mostly worked on the acceleration of algorithms (for computer vision, such as filtering and CNNs), and in the end did a thesis on distributed systems and serverless acceleration using FPGAs.

I don’t do research anymore (didn’t pursue a PhD afterall), but here you can find all links to my previous works.

Master Thesis

BlastFunction: an FPGA-as-a-Service system for accelerated serverless computing

For my master thesis I developed a distributed system for enabling the acceleration of serverless functions using FPGAs. The project included:

• a custom OpenCL implementation for executing workloads on remote nodes
• a module for interacting with Altera’s FPGAs using the remote OpenCL library above, deployed on every node in the cluster
• a kubernetes operator for allocating FPGAs to serverless functions (using OpenFAAS) in order to share the same FPGA between multiple functions (using the same hardware module)

I learned a lot on low-level programming (interacting with shared memory and threads to allow OpenCL remoting) and kubernetes. The most rewarding aspect was seeing the project working on a 3-nodes Kubernetes cluster, in which multiple serverless functions used the same FPGAs concurrently to share the workload, improving the overall throughput of the system!

Articles

Patents

An FPGA-As-A-Service System for Accelerated Serverless Computing
International Publication Number: WO2020234792A1
Authors: Marco Bacis, Rolando Brondolin, Marco Domenico Santambrogio